Acyclicity Statement and Dependency Criteria for the General Theory of Cognitive Structuring

Abstract

This document specifies how paper-level dependency is identified within the General Theory of Cognitive Structuring (GTCS) and states the acyclicity properties of the current owner-paper dependency architecture. A registered dependency is based on an actual audited import from one owner paper into another rather than on conceptual resemblance, shared vocabulary, citation, publication order, or a plausible retrospective reconstruction of how the theory might have been developed. The Version 2.0 dependency architecture distinguishes direct owner dependencies from boundary or contextual support and from synthesis-integration links. Under the registered direct relation, the thirteen-owner graph contains 33 direct dependency edges and no directed cycles. The document also explains why apparent conceptual loops do not constitute formal dependency cycles when the relevant construction is not actually imported by the alleged upstream owner. The acyclicity statement is a dependency-governance document rather than a proof compendium. It does not transfer ownership among papers, infer dependencies from thematic proximity, or establish that every conceptual relation in GTCS is acyclic. Its scope is the registered paper-level dependency relation used by the current formal corpus.